Friday, May 23, 2014

They're not losing by winning, they're winning by losing

by digby

Politico says that the Republicans are in real trouble because they have to rile the base to wing off year elections but then are too extreme to win the presidency. In my piece at Salon I show that this is a feature not a bug:

I wonder if Republican pollsters were telling them the same thing in, say, 1966, when the demographics looked like this:

Now that was a demographic time bomb that encompassed the most radical left-wing young generation in history. And guess what happened? A powerful conservative movement happened that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan just 14 years later. Perhaps it’s not genetics that is determining their behavior but rather their own experience.

This is not to say that millennials will not be much more liberal than their baby boomer forebears turned out to be, but it would likely have been predicted by many after 1964 that the Republicans had better figure out how to cater to “the youth” or they were doomed. But they didn’t. They catered to fear and resentment and anger and loss and they built their movement around it.

I note that these are different times with a different experience but that when you look at what they have accomplished and what need to accomplish politically, there's really no reason for them to panic. They're doing just fine.

I have often noted that the GOP is the most successful minority in the world. They know how to work it.